Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday May 18, 2010 @07:11AM
from the gettin-loopy-wid-it dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Per The Weather Channel's tropical expert Dr. Richard Knabb, 'based on satellite images, model simulations, and on-site research vessel reports, I think it is reasonable to conclude that the oil slick at the surface is very near or partially in the Loop Current. The Loop Current is responsible in the first place for extending that stream of oil off to the southeast in satellite imagery. With its proximity to the northern edge of the Loop Current it may be only a matter of weeks or even days before the ocean surface oil is transported toward the Florida Keys and southeast Florida.'" Other experts are a little more cautious: "We know the oil has not entered the Loop Current," Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry said at a news conference Monday afternoon. "A leading edge sheen is getting close to it, but it has not entered the Loop Current. The larger volume of oil is several miles from the Loop Current."

There's a lot of discussion about this over at dailykos - apparently tarballs take a while to form, as opposed to the brownish goo seen on the "60 Minutes" piece. So if they're actually tarballs they're not from this release of oil. They're being analyzed.

Yup, I read that discussion with interest. Apparently the "tarballs" are actually globs of nano-sized Black Helicopters created under the Majestic-12 program at Area 51 by Haliburton on orders from the Tea Party and their New World Order masters, the Lizard Man Kings of the Houses of Saud and Bush.

Admittedly I kind of skimmed the comments, and in fact I wasn't sure that was the tarballs article - it could have been any DailyKos story.

Everybody knows that Haliburton's patented petro-evil technology is the best in the business for artificially triggering earthquakes near impoverished nations as a pretext for the militarized export of neoliberal capitalism; but if you want nano-sized Black Helicopters, you need the nanotech that SAIC acquired when the reverse-engineered the Roswell Grey artefacts under contract from the Rand corporation...

This. We real Linux geeks have been using tarballs since the 70s and BP comes along does it on a massive and claims it as something new. I'm sure they've even gone out and gotten patents on it (just because you add "in the water" doesn't make it patentable, goddammit!). I bet M$ put them up to it, the bastards.

On the plus side, with recent advances in DNA computing, we should just be able to introduce bzip2-capable e. coli into the environment, which will shrink the tarballs to a more manageable size in no time...

How are a few dozen tar balls on a beach an ecological disaster? It sounds more like a summer job opportunity for local teenagers - the local city council offers $10 per pound of tar ball collected at the beach.

How do they know that these tar balls even originated from the BP spill? There is a lot of natural leakage of oil into the Gulf (estimates are around 2000 barrels per day, every day year in year out since the formation of the Gulf millions of years ago), and this isn't exactly

It sounds more like a summer job opportunity for local teenagers - the local city council offers $10 per pound of tar ball collected at the beach.

How quaint. The deadly disaster has suddenly been spun into a summer employment opportunity for Archie and his chums. Oh wait. They don't know how to scuba dive, so their tar collection will be limited to walking along the shore. Tar down in the coral and elsewhere along the ocean floor will go uncollected.

...the incentive is to go after the low-hanging fruit of big globs and ignore the smaller pieces.

Speak for yourself. The real challenge lies in manufacturing your own tar balls that can pass as the real thing, and yet manufacture them in such mass quantities that you can recoup your expenses and then some (of course, when I am speaking of expenses, I'm not counting the cost of ruining your mom's kitchen, her pots and bathtub, nor am I including the cost of retarring your neighbors roof and driveway. They have jobs. You don't. They can certainly afford to subsidize your entrepreneurial spirit).

I wonder with both statements, if they refer to just what they can see from the surface, or what is under the surface. Just because a surface slick may be close to the loop, the majority of the oil may not be close at all, and vice verse. Either way its not good.

I'm no geologist or really much of a scientist at all, but I recall the nuke thread and didn't really get to ask the question: why is nuking this oil well a bad idea? Everyones' initial response was "nuke it? haha, that's preposterous!" but I didn't really see an explanation of why its not a viable option?

Assuming it worked at stopping the continuing spill, what would be the negative effects? Assuming it didn't, what would be the negative effects of trying?

Oh boo hoo? Given the choice between losing the well and having the well spill all of it's contents into the ocean and causing havoc on the environment in the Gulf, Florida, the Atlantic and possibly around Europe once it gets into the Gulf Stream, I think we should deprive BP of a few billion dollars.

While it's true that this is flamebait, unfortunately so is the behavior of BP and other petro companies.

We cannot just say "oh that's distasteful" and turn our heads. Sometimes burying our heads in the sand does not buy us safety or security. Sometimes it leads to the collapse of whole banking institutions or small Mediterranean nations.

So while you may not agree with his view, or while you may consider it flamebait, consider that the truth is not always pleasant.

They're already in the process of plugging the well permanently. Unless I'm interpreting this plan incorrectly, this will also create two new wellheads (although I'm not sure that they will be usable as production wells).

In any event, the currently leaking well was for exploration purposes only.

We also want to prevent something like this [wikipedia.org] from happening.

It seems much easier to tap energy from that crater than to do what they are having to do to plug the Gulf well.

Of course they should figure out if they would actually get significant energy from it. If yes, do some seismic studies to have a guess at how much gas is left, and whether there are any more "surprising" caverns under the surface that they might wish to avoid...

To the GP: holy crap! Thanks for the link, mate, had no idea such a thing existed -- I would've probably sided with the idiotic geologists who thought the whole thing would extinguish in a few days. Since 1971 and counting? Talk about the mother of all fires!

To the Parent: What I believe the GP was trying to imply is that should they somehow manage to ignite the crude in the well, either directly should the energy from, say, a nuclear explosion go off its projected dispersion path and make the entire well's

British Petroleum would lose the well permanently and have to drill a new one.

--BMO

I love how trolls can get modded +5 Insightful here. Please elaborate on your experience in the oil & gas industry.

I am a product engineer that designs subsea equipment. The company I work for sells equipment to the majors, one of them being BP. I can't tell you the amount of hours people have worked to try and fix this problem. In addition to the people involved, people that have had zero to do with the original Horizon products/well are creating Plan A - D solutions in 24-hour shifts. This is all in a

The problem is that there is a massive oil reserve deep underground that is under extreme pressure, but contained by rock and dirt. BP has tapped into that reserve with basically a giant straw and now that straw is leaking. Detonating a nuclear bomb near the leak could open that hole up wider allowing much, much oil to flow past.

Furthermore, AFAIK, the effects of a nuclear bomb on underwater sea life are basically unknown. And instead of the nuclear fallout landing on the ground near the explosion, as it would in an above ground explosion, here the fallout would be free to travel in the ocean currents.

I think this was a scifi Saturday night movie. Giant Killer Piranha or something like that. I think it just ticked them off and then they ate the submarine that tried to nuke them. Not nearly as cool as the shark snagging the 747 out of the sky movie.

Again, I'm skeptical that one nuke in the Gulf is going to be enough to start killing everyone. It could, theoretically, contaminate stuff there in the Gulf.

It won't necessarily kill "everyone". What it will do is introduce radioactivity into the food chain which would take years to disperse. There are a lot of people that depend on food from the Gulf of Mexico for their livelihood, and I am not just talking about Americans here. Want to tell the fisherman in Haiti that sorry, you can't feed your family for 4 years because we just torched off a nuke?

But I don't know that it would be any worse in the long run than letting everything get contaminated with oil.

It would be a lot worse. Oil is relatively separable from water. If you neutron activate 23Na to 24Na in sal

Furthermore, AFAIK, the effects of a nuclear bomb on underwater sea life are basically unknown. And instead of the nuclear fallout landing on the ground near the explosion, as it would in an above ground explosion, here the fallout would be free to travel in the ocean currents.

Those who fail to learn the lessons of history [wikipedia.org] are doomed to repeat it in summer school.

The question becomes: In which case is the rich gulf fishery more fucked? If it's killed off by a massive and ongoing petrochemical spill, or if the sea life is rendered inedible for decades by radioactivity?

Why would it be decades? Are we going to encase the nuke in Cobalt 60? or wrap it in iodine?

Detonating a nuclear bomb near the leak could open that hole up wider allowing much, much oil to flow past.

Placed properly, it will collapse the bore hole. Its been done before, the physics are well understood.

Furthermore, AFAIK, the effects of a nuclear bomb on underwater sea life are basically unknown. And instead of the nuclear fallout landing on the ground near the explosion, as it would in an above ground explosion, here the fallout would be free to travel in the ocean currents.

The physics are well know, we've detonated MANY bombs underground on our own soil. We know how far down it needs to be and how it will effect the surrounding rock.

The physics under a mile of water are completely different than underground. Why would any of the nukes in our existing stockpile be able to take 5000' of pressure? A Trident can launch at 800 feet max, IIRC.

The prospect of a nuke igniting the oil deposit is one of the more persuasive counterarguments. It may be a low probability, but when one of the possible side effects of an experiment is the destruction of life as we know it, that tends to make people shy away from trying it.

The prospect of a nuke igniting the oil deposit is one of the more persuasive counterarguments. It may be a low probability, but when one of the possible side effects of an experiment is the destruction of life as we know it, that tends to make people shy away from trying it.

Russia has experimented with nuking underwater oil-spills and has been rather successful (they managed to close the well on 4 of 5 tries).
(http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=et&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kp.ru%2Fdaily%2F24482%2F640124%2F&sl=ru&tl=en)
The problem with this one is the massive oil reserve under the seabed.
Should it rupture and release billions of barrels of oil that is under immense pressure, a Yellowstone scale extinction

but I didn't really see an explanation of why its not a viable option?

1. I doubt anyone has nukes designed to function at several kilometers underwater. One would have to be constructed first.

2. You don't just set the nuke off near the hole and hope for the best. You drill a hole into the ground, insert the nuke, and seal the hole, and then explode it to collapse the drill hole. Thus, you need to drill this hole.

Both of these take a lot of time, and there are many, many detail which may not be feasible.

3. The smallest nuke that was historically deployed by the USA was the 155mm artillery shell. Conveniently already round, just like a well hole. And about 7 inches across. But I believe its officially out of the arsenal. You'll probably need a bigger hole, think goatse size gaping hole. But to kill the well with drilling mud, you only "need" like 2 inches or so diameter. So its going to take way the heck longer to drill the well to place the nuke, than to drill a simple mud-kill well. Why not shut th

I think the problem with a nuke is more political than practical. This administration (which depends heavily on environmentalists for support) is already taking flack from the environmental left for having advocated more offshore drilling and for this accident. Using a nuke to seal it (especially if they weren't absolutely sure it would actually work), would be tantamount to Barack Obama holding up a giant sign reading "Don't vote for me next time" to a good chunk of his constituency. Contrary to what most

People and nuclear technology have a weird dance. Nuclear weapons are a cure to numerous difficult social problems. And nobody should have them, except me. They should not be used but always kept ready to use... they should be banned.. etc. Killing and death and it's preparations, methods and politics. Never fails to get everyone excited. Then the Nazi comments can come, end the conversations. and everyone shuts up and goes home, to do it all over again.

meant to appeal to low iq dimwits as a valid solution to the energy crisis? you know, buy us a couple more months of soccer moms in SUVs in suburban sprawl, before the inevitable? hey, what's a little ecosystem destruction when we need to go to walmart to buy plastic crap and mcdonalds to shovel more calories in our distended waistlines? why's it smell like oil near the beach mommy?

as the economy recovers, as newly rich brazilian, chinese, and indian economies begin to suck energy like the west, as the oil only gets deeper and deeper... welcome to a near future, 2015, 2020: $10 a gallon gas. except those brazilian, chinese, and indians: they are already seeking alternatives. you know like nuclear... NOT IN MY BACKYARD!

you were warned back in the 1970s. but you kept funding the saudis, who kept building wahhabi madrassas in pakistan, and you got 9/11. but you still didn't see the writing on the wall. in fact, you thought it was a good excuse to secure some iraqi oil

now you're destroying your own shorelines, and still living in denial, still a hopeless rationalizing junkie addict

when the inevitable comes, when we can no longer afford the gas guzzling lifestyle, many of you will say "who saw that coming?"

meant to appeal to low iq dimwits as a valid solution to the energy crisis? you know, buy us a couple more months of soccer moms in SUVs in suburban sprawl, before the inevitable? hey, what's a little ecosystem destruction when we need to go to walmart to buy plastic crap and mcdonalds to shovel more calories in our distended waistlines? why's it smell like oil near the beach mommy?

as the economy recovers, as newly rich brazilian, chinese, and indian economies begin to suck energy like the west, as the oil only gets deeper and deeper... welcome to a near future, 2015, 2020: $10 a gallon gas. except those brazilian, chinese, and indians: they are already seeking alternatives. you know like nuclear... NOT IN MY BACKYARD!

you were warned back in the 1970s. but you kept funding the saudis, who kept building wahhabi madrassas in pakistan, and you got 9/11. but you still didn't see the writing on the wall. in fact, you thought it was a good excuse to secure some iraqi oil

now you're destroying your own shorelines, and still living in denial, still a hopeless rationalizing junkie addict

when the inevitable comes, when we can no longer afford the gas guzzling lifestyle, many of you will say "who saw that coming?"

plenty of us did, jackass

Yes, I'll bet you did.

I suppose to prove your point you don't drive, you don't use oil in your house, you have solar panels on the roof and of course, you use all natural stuff, no plastic or anything made from oil?

Its very much like facing your own mortality, or mortality in general. Folks whom are a little further along the grieving path or however you want to describe it, tend to get tired of hearing people stuck at the "panic" and/or "bargaining" stage VERY loudly declaring their location on the path. To everyone before them on the path, they make no sense or at best are annoying. You're at the bargaining stage of the grief process, that's just great, and just why should

Without oil-based fertilizer, pesticides and oil-powered farm equipment no real decision needs to be made about who is going to starve - approximately 90% of the current population will starve. The crops that are grown can't be transported to markets either.

If you live in a city, you are pretty much doomed should this come to pass. The cities without food are simply deathtraps. Worse, before you actually starve you will either be swept up into a gang searching for the last few scraps or killed by such a

whatever is lost for moving food to the city is gained and then some by everyone not needing to drive 2 hours and sit in gridlock every day just to do their business

dense cities are the norm for humanity. dense cities make sense when all you have is sailing ships and mules. when oil goes to $15 a gallon, the cities will contract in size and normalcy will return after 50 years of cheap oil fueled insanity. suburban sprawl is an artificial endangered

That crass slogan was the result of people listening to an Alaskan politician on oil matters (might as well ask a Texan politician too, while you're at it). You don't get advice from someone with such a vested interest in the matter. That's like treating the governor of Nebraska as an objective adviser on the question of whether we need more wheat subsidies.

i want you to listen to reason: we need to get off oil now, or we will suffer

and you react like i'm trying to run your life?

no, i'm trying to wake you up from your ignorant complacency, and you are reacting like a teenager told by his mom he needs to stop playing videogames and start studying. that indolent sloth of a teenager would then say 'Look on the bright side. Now you have an outlet for all your self-righteous indignation. Nothing feels quite as good to someone trying to run other people's lives as saying "I told you so!"'

so you are basically saying that american energy policy is akin to a fat lazy useless teenager with a sense of spoiled entitlement... but i'm in the wrong because i'm pointing out the simple obvious truth that we're on the wrong path? is that your message to me?

i want you to listen to reason: we need to get off oil now, or we will suffer

I know you and I disagree on a lot of political topics, but I'm 100% with you here. I'm a greedy capitalist who's far more interested in my own lifestyle than in a spotted owl, but I want us to get off oil and onto something long-term sustainable, and ASAP. I'd happily encourage Congress to fund a Manhattan Project-style national security-motivated investment to make it happen. Forget about carbon dioxide and all that (even if I do think those things are important) - I just don't want to depend on the good graces of countries who hate us to keep my country running.

Either we invest in alternative energy development now and eat the research costs for the next X years until it comes online, or we wait until gas gets ludicrously expensive and then start research - and then wait X years after that until we can use it. Maybe if we'd taken this stuff seriously in the 70s and 80s, X would almost be up and we'd have viable alternatives available today. Thanks, previous generation.

If you have a google account, check out this link [google.com]. It adds the ArcGIS Server - Message in a Bottle applet to your google maps. Click the map and watch the "bottle" travel the path of the streamlines. Do it a couple times around the area of the oil spill and get a rough idea of the possible trajectories. Yes there are significant differences between an oil slick on top of the water and a glass bottle, but I have yet to find anywhere else public-ish facing where you can dynamically plot stream line points for free. Map experts/enthusiast?

The press is focussing too much on the "what if" and not the "what is."

First of all, how do we even know that the oil is harmful? There haven't been any long-term scientific studies on oil spills of this much oil of this kind. Why, for all we know, it might be beneficial! We shouldn't rush to judgement until this has been properly studied.

Second, let's stop using loaded terms like "pollution." Economists say we should measure the value of something by what people are willing to pay for it. Oil is worth $72 a barrel. The price of enough Instant Ocean to mix up a barrel of seawater is $8.72. So let's stop talking about oil as "polluting" seawater, let's be rational and unemotional and say that the oil is "enriching" the seawater.

Third, hasn't it occurred to anyone that this oil might prevent the harmful sea surges that did so much damage to New Orleans during the Katrina disaster? Let's stop berating BP when all they're really doing is pouring oil on the troubled waters.

So, how long you been working in the Petroleum industry?
Do you recall the damage inflicted by the Exxon Valdez? By the Santa Barbara spill in 1969?
Surely the oil comes from a natural source but so does mercury. Do you want to sprinkle some mercury on your cornflakes?
Yes, this stuff is polluting. There is no question of that. Unless you can drink a gallon of oil, this question is done.

Other experts are a little more cautious: "We know the oil has not entered the Loop Current," Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry said at a news conference Monday afternoon. "A leading edge sheen is getting close to it, but it has not entered the Loop Current. The larger volume of oil is several miles from the Loop Current."

I think you got a word wrong there. Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry is not an other expert in this area at all. Any other [scientific] expert would never make such an absolutist statement, and a few miles is within a hour or two's drift (*spread is not necessarily the same rate as the water currents) so by the time her statement hit the papers it would already be false. And who knows what the hell's going on subsurface where the satellites don't see?

"Dispersal" of a slick into a cloud of droplets does not mean the cloud-plume itself has or will dispersed.

And why has the US gov't not put its foot down and demanded that the invited but then uninvited (by BP the day before they thought the dome would work) Wood's Hole team be allowed to measure the flow rate with the instruments that BP claimed did not exist? [NY Times 16 May] Even if there's nothing much we can do with that number now, by having better data about the size of the spill and measuring the effects over the coming months and years we can better understand and plan future responses. I see what BP has to lose by that number being properly established, but why aren't they being forced to establish it anyway?

Maybe because they would have to remove the siphon they have running and stop collecting oil? Just let it spill out into the ocean while the scientists futz around with their equipment?

besides the post facto aspect of your argument (they've had weeks) and the fact that you could sum the volumes of the siphoned and measured split, standard acoustic flow rate monitors clamp around the tube and can be placed well upstream of the siphon tube.

Wow, so many ways your hate blinds you. But let's look at a factual one. Suppose, for a moment, that you've got a few robots working a mile undersea. Imagine these have umbilical cords a mile long. Imagine that these umbilical cords are connected to corks bobbing on top of the water. Imagine, now, that, while you're loosing a several million dollars a day, someone else wants to bring their own robot in and drive all around your work site. How well is that going to work? By the way, they're not there to help

Rachel Maddow has shown an interview named BP's haste lays waste to Gulf waters [msn.com] with a whistleblower from BP who explained that just a little before the disaster a BP manager told Transocean manager to do the work of putting in the corks into the well faster, so that the pumping of oil could be done faster. Aparently the Transocean manager was against it and they had an argument and BP won.

So it's mostly BP's fault, but I think still Transocean should not have complied with this clear violation of the procedure.

Was there any ever real doubt that a spill of this magnitude was not going to reach the loop?

Here in Fla we get to deal with all sorts of fun naturally occurring things. And I don't really begrudge those things much like those people who live inland in tornado ally don't really begrudge mother nature for those things.

But this...gah. And then on top of it I have to watch the super rich play the blame game? Fuck you. Seriously, fuck YOU.

According to NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco, who was interviewed on last night's McNeil Lehrer News Hour [pbs.org], the oil entering the Loop will have minimal environmental impact in other parts of the Gulf. She opines that "By the time the oil is in the loop current, it's likely to be very, very diluted. And, so, it's not likely to have a very significant impact. It sounds scarier than it is."

But did she mention that some genius in DC figured it would be a good idea to let BP dump millions of gallons of soap into the water to sink the oil? The oil on the surface is but a percentage of the real oil pools. Mixing soap with the oil causes it to move lower in the sea column. The underwater oil columns are more dangerous in that they will wash onto coral and suffocate them from the bottom.

Is she diluting BPs "5,000 barrels" per day or outside experts "100,000 barrels a day" estimate?

Asper later e-mailed Los Angeles Times staff writer Raja Abdulrahim, who had interviewed him Sunday in Cocodrie, La.:

1) We are not 100% sure that the plumes are oil. We have NOT analyzed the samples yet and won't know what's in them until we do. That will take at least a few days or even a week or more and we don't want to rush these results. The sensor we used is not definitive for oil and other compounds do respo

This disaster so far seems to be beyond our technology to control. Had this turned out to be an event that would destroy all life on Earth (Or if it still turns out to be,) we would have been completely powerless to stop it. The damage done to the ocean already is beyond our power to repair as well, our only option is to wait and let nature deal with it as best it can. Millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of technological development and we are still as weak and helpless as babies in a univ

From what Wikipedia says, this may not be BP's fault. Halliburton (the company famous for Iraq oil controversies including lying to the US administration) were cementing the well just a day before (by their own accounts). Transocean own the rig (renting it to BP) and their chief executive explained the cause of the incident saying, "there was a sudden, catastrophic failure of the cement, the casing or both."

Oh, BP is responsible for SO MUCH MORE than that. That company used to be known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, it drilled in Iran for decades before they got rid of the Shah. In 1951, when Iran finally had a democratically elected government, which decided to follow the wishes of the people and to nationalize the Oil fields and then provide APOC with a contract, which it hated, APOC went crying to UK and US politicians, and then the Democratically Elected Government of Iran was removed through a coup and APOC was once again free to do as it pleased, it got almost the contract that it wanted, it was less though, because there was just too much pressure from the people of Iran, who I think hated the guts of APOC.

APOC renamed to BP at that time probably as a way to whitewash its image, you know: Accenture (formerly known as Anderson Consulting) did the same after Enron.

BP is a very old and I would say evil entity, what I mean is that the processes in the company are such that from the outside the results of its work look evil.

The thing to consider, though... how do you put a price on catastrophe? These companies don't really have enough money to compensate for it -- and in reality, since when could you ever compensate with MONEY something this ridiculously catastrophic to all things biological being affected.

we should force them to reinvest all of their money (which would/should be paid to the people anyway for such catastrophe) into renewable energy production and then allo

The important thing is to get the leak stopped. Let the courts sort out responsibility (and liability) at their own pace.

The thing to consider, though... how do you put a price on catastrophe? These companies don't really have enough money to compensate for it -- and in reality, since when could you ever compensate with MONEY something this ridiculously catastrophic to all things biological being affected.

I think you are placing too large a value on those biological things. It's just an oil leak, not the end of the world. It's not even doing anything really serious like contaminating drinking water.

From a witness on 60 minutes, BP is the one who insisted, over the objections of the drilling service company, that the well not be filled with mud before plugging it for future connection to the production rig. Apparently it would have cost them some time and a few million dollars to add and later remove the mud, but if the mud was there, the failure of the cement would not have caused a catstrophic leak.

The acoustic thing you are talking about is a switch, not an additional valve. It would have been another, redundant system alerting the failed blow out preventer that it should close (early on in the recovery process, they sent robots down and attempted to activate the blow out preventer, so it is quite clear that it failed).

I don't pretend to understand the systems well enough to know whether the acoustic switch would have activated earlier than other systems (a scenario where it may have made a differenc